whna | GLX meeting highlights, Oct 23 2017 (Reply)

I have good news and bad news.

Good news: Construction is underway. Appropriate bids for the next phase came in. MBTA is working on a December 2021 deadline for operation. It sounds like there may actually be the Green Line in the future.

Bad news: The community path is low on their priority list. In this election year, there were a whole bunch of the local pols in the room. And they all heard this and they were all aerated right away. I'll cover a bit more in the longer section, but just so you'll know there was already noise about this and our representatives were engaged.

If you want to sign up for their notices of future meetings on this, go to this site: http://greenlineextension.eot.state.ma.us/ And click the "sign up for email updates".

One piece that has potential to affect us (as WHNA) specifically: they are planning to form "GLX community working groups" around the construction part (they specifically said not design, design is over). And these would be station-specific groups so that the group is in tune with issues in that area. So we should have representation there and someone from our group would be well suited if this is something you are into (I'm looking at you, planning nerds).

I'll go into a bit more detail below the cut. I'll include the crappy photos I took and they'll take up a lot of space so I don't want to irritate people reading on mobile devices. Click "More" if you care about the gory details.

The event began with a project update. They laid out the current scope and summary with this slide.

Quick summary: 7 stations (includes the Lechmere relocation). 1 in Union Square. 5 that run out to our hill.

Although it says "Includes a multiuse community path (Lowell Street to Washington Street)", stay tuned. That's not an actual inclusion right now.

So with the new design bids they were getting, they had some things that they had to have. But they also created a second list of things that I guess they think would be nice-to-have, but are not required from the bidders. This is called the "Potential Additive Options" stuff. So the bidders (as I understand it) are "incentivized" to include additional scope items, as long as they stick to 2 key things--stay in this budget, and stay within the "sacred" project completion date of December 2021.

We see the list, and they look like things we've discussed in the past, so they make sense in this project. But the key feature of this list is that *they* (meaning MBTA) prioritized this list from 1-6. And that order is NOT NEGOTIABLE. Mary Jo Rosetti nailed this issue with a very sharp question. T folks explained that they prioritized based on what they expect would benefit the Green Line customers themselves. I couldn't understand then how that dropped the path priority--that's how we plan to *get* to the stations, right? I am baffled by this.

All the pols pretty much had kittens at this point. Every one of them that stood up to say something (and it was most of them in attendance) brought up the community path as a top priority for us. And the sentiment in the crowd shifted very quickly too.

Denise Provost got up and noted to us that not only did MBTA not get community input on that prioritization, but they did not consult with our leadership either. She chewed them out a bit on that, and I certainly enjoyed that part. And I think we should expect to hear more about that. And if called to press the MBTA, we should, I think (personal opinion, not speaking for WHNA).

Summary: It was certainly great to hear that we are getting the Green Line still (yes, I know, things could change). But this community path low priority was very shocking and disappointing.